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Save Your Eyes: Go Dark on GitHub

I’ve always been a bit of a nocturnal person. If I had my preference, I would go to bed every morning just shortly after the sun comes up. I know this probably seems weird to many of you, but it’s always been something I’ve struggled with. My circadian rhythm has always been that of a “night owl,” and unfortunately, the rest of the world runs on daylight.

That being said, I do the majority of my coding at night, so it’s important that I’m vigilant about making my physical environment conducive to my health in every aspect. I read an article many years ago about saving your vision by not stressing your eyes. Recommendations on how to do this included lowering your dash panel lights while driving at night, reducing the brightness on your computer screen to keep it proportional with the amount of light you have in the room, and sleeping in complete darkness. I learned later that you can also help save your eyes by using dark backgrounds on your screens in low-light situations. I’ve achieved this through a few different methods. First and foremost, I run the “terminal” theme in my Gmail.

This is a very easy way to get your Gmail dark and save some strain on your eyes.

Secondly, being a Unix/Linux guy, always living in the terminal and writing code and script, I use a palette for my terminal and a scheme for vi called solarized. (vi is a text editor for the Unix/Linux terminal) As you can see below, it’s a fairly dark text editing theme.

Today, while sitting here staring at my Github page, I realized how stark white it was and also realized this would be another great opportunity to save myself some eye strain. (Please don’t judge my Github too harshly for lack of world altering content. All of my work related Git repos are separate.) After a quick Google search, I learned that going dark on Github was not only feasible, but quite simple. I primarily use Google Chrome, so I hopped on the extensions page for Chrome and found an extension called Stylus. Once I installed and enabled that extension in Chrome, I then hopped over to userstyles.org and installed a dark Github theme, and presto, I have an eye-friendly Github interface for all of my late night coding and scripting.

I hope that this is of some benefit to someone out there as it has definitely been an improvement for me. Happy Hacking!